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Popular Music is a term which covers a vast array of different musical genres. Whilst it is both easy and popular to loosely group large numbers of similar artists together in ‘umbrella’ genres such as ‘Rock’ or ‘Jazz’, one risks misrepresenting or wrongly pidgeon-holing an artist which may have influences and style traits reminiscent of artists in a completely different genre. An example of this is ‘Stoner Rock’. In this essay I will be exploring the rise of Stoner Rock, what sets it apart from other genres and its place in popular music today.
So, what is Stoner Rock?
Well, there has been very little academic study of Stoner Rock and so true consensus on exactly what constitutes Stoner Rock is rare. However, the roots of the genre are to be found in the late 1960s when the boundaries of what was acceptable in popular music were broken down, and artists began to express themselves in their own personal styles. Perhaps the seeds of Stoner Rock were sewn by the late Jimi Hendrix. Whilst Hendrix took most of his influence from the Blues and was not wholly inventive in this respect, his experimentation with new sounds and a knack for expressive improvisation laid the foundations for future artists to build upon.
As the 1970s approached, new artists like Black Sabbath and Pentagram introduced a slow, almost menacing sound to rock music (Wikipedia). Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album is cited by many as being the album which spawned both Stoner Rock and Heavy Metal, opening to the doors for many aspiring musicians uncomfortable with the upbeat pop-tunes of the early to mid 1960s. Black Sabbath’s bass-heavy sound and down tuned guitars (on account of guitarist Toni Iommi missing two finger-tips) combined with the psychedelic free styling and loose song-structure of Hendrix can now be seen to be the loose blue-print of modern Stoner Rock (Tucson Weekly, October 31 2002).
Whilst the bare-bones musical style of Stoner Rock began to take shape out of the explosion in experimentation and expressionism of the 1970s, there was still no identifiable genre of ‘Stoner Rock’. There had been no Stoner Rock bands, and it would be some time before the genre began to take shape as an independent and distinctive movement in popular music.
Whilst influences can come from many places, the genesis of a particular musical genre is often centralised around a particular place. For example, Jazz was a movement out of New Orleans, Grunge came out of Seattle and House was the product of musicians in Chicago. Stoner Rock is no different, and has it’s origins in the windswept, baking hot deserts of the western United States.
In the late 1980s, west-coast punk rock was continuing to grow in popularity, and the audience was increasingly made up of teenage males from the isolated, suburban towns and cities out in the Californian desert. As heavier music and a punk sensibility infiltrated these more isolated desert communities, bands began to form and the area around Palm Desert began to have a thriving high-school punk scene. The sense of isolation in the desert played perfectly into the anti-establishment feeling present in most punk of the era, whilst the more relaxed nature of life in the desert and the absence of many inner-city problems which influenced the mainly city-based bands like Black-Flag meant that the desert punks were a lot less angry and a lot less militant than those in the cities.
As the popularity of punk grew, so did the use of illegal drugs in the desert. The desert towns were generally middle-class, with teenagers having a limited, yet adequate amount of disposable income. Due to the subversive and ‘cool’ image of drugs and the possibility for escapism, soft drugs increasingly became something for teenagers to spend their allowances on. As marijuana use in particular increased, music tastes broadened from the aggressive, ‘full-on’ music of punk, to deeper, heavier music from bands like Black Sabbath and the desert’s own, The Obsessed. Most of the early desert Stoner Rock musicians started playing music in the many high-school punk bands in Palm Desert and other larger towns.
A growing trend within the teenage bands was to hold concerts out in the desert, away from any towns or cities. These concerts or ‘generator parties’ consisted of the bands setting up their equipment on a suitable area of land and hooking their amplifiers up to hired or borrowed generators (Schmidt, 2001) Attendees would simply stand around the drum kit and form a makeshift performance area for the artists to play. These generator parties were places where drug-taking was common and had an atmosphere comparable to the parties held during the UK’s rave scene of the late 1980s.
As the generator party scene progressed and the local music scene was saturated with sound-alike punk bands, some of the young musicians sought an alternative and more original form of expression. It was around this time when a group of four high-school students began to experiment with playing louder, heavier and slower music. In 1989, Brant Bjork, Josh Homme, Chris Cockerell and John Garcia formed ‘Sons of Kyuss’ and began to play regularly at desert generator parties. Their music instantly gathered attention and Sons of Kyuss became a much talked about and must-see band. Their popularity grew steadily through local connections such as journalist Chris Long, a writer and club promoter (Billboard Magazine, Jan 15 1994). In 1990, the band recorded their debut album ‘Wretch’ (with new bassist Nick Oliveri) under their new name of ‘Kyuss’. The album had a large effect on the local scene and inspired many of the punk bands to change direction and infuse their music with more harmonies, melody and deep, rumbling bass-lines. Only a limited release was available for the album, which was released on the indie label Dali Records, but word of mouth and the popularity of ‘mix-tapes’ (home-made compilation tapes circulated among friends) gave Kyuss much-needed exposure. In 1992, Kyuss recorded ‘Blues for the Red Sun’ and sparked the modern Stoner Rock movement.
Blues for the Red Sun was a landmark in Stoner Rock and formed many of the codes and conventions of the genre. The sound of the album was something almost completely new with guitars tuned down to ‘C’ and amps turned all the way up. Josh Homme famously played through a bass-amp to achieve an original and deafeningly heavy guitar tone (Billboard Magazine, Jan 15 1994). The music of ‘Blues for the Red Sun’ is heavily reminiscent of the slow ‘doom’ sound of Black Sabbath, yet contained very melodic and psychedelic elements combined with lyrics that followed a very punk ethic. The guitar riffs were heavily blues influenced and contained much repetition with the effect of having an almost trance-like quality. The album gained the attention of major-label Elektra and led to an Australian arena tour with label-mates Metallica. This success provided opportunities for many of the other California-based Stoner Rock bands such as desert-skaters, Fu-Manchu and Fatso Jetson.
Despite Kyuss’ success on Elektra, there were not many other Stoner Rock bands signed to major labels. For the whole of the early 1990s, Stoner Rock releases were usually on limited release, often on Vinyl and received almost no radio-play. Because releases were mainly local, Stoner Rock was viewed as a much localised genre with few bands outside of California. This would however, change as the second half of the 1990s saw a massive increase in the popularity of the internet.
The internet’s involvement in the Stoner Rock scene can not be over-stated (Stoner Rock.com, 6/8/2001). Prior to the internet being used to promote and distribute music, there were very few Stoner Rock bands outside of California, and only a handful of artists outside of the USA (Scaruffi, 2005). The independent labels that the bands were signed to couldn’t afford to distribute their recordings on a wide scale and so the bands were unable to gain widespread popularity. With the internet, this all changed. Record labels and even individual bands moved towards selling their records online, cutting out the cost of stocking the albums in high-street outlets. Alongside the online-shopping elements, bands could now use the internet as a promotion tool. Stoner Rock bands have been amongst the most internet-friendly and many made use of sites such as StonerRock.com where they could upload MP3 versions of their songs for fans to listen to for free.
In the mid 1990s, Stoner Rock started to gain a larger, global following. This fan base however was not particularly big and Stoner Rock remained a distinctly ‘underground’ movement. This has largely been the situation ever since. The internet, it seemed, could only help so much. Whilst it was used successfully as a promotional and retail tool, the internet was limited in that there were a limited number of users. The majority of music was still being sold the conventional way, in shops around the world. There had been some headway into this market thanks to the internet, as increased profits allowed labels like Southern Lord to expand and become able to release their records in mainstream retail outlets.
The number of Stoner Rock bands grew almost exponentially throughout the 1990s, with some acts gaining critical notoriety. The jazz-laden, funky stoner rock of Clutch has garnered them high accolades from several leading music publications (including. Rolling Stoner, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer and Q Magazine). However, despite the critical success of some of Stoner Rock’s most notable bands, it was not until 1998 that Stoner Rock burst into the mainstream.
The self-titled debut album by Queens of the Stone Age proved to be a universal success, and thrust ex-Kyuss guitarist, Josh Homme into the limelight. The music media was quick to label the band ‘Stoner Rock’, much to Homme's distaste (Stoner Rock.com 27 September 2000). Stoner Rock was seen by many, to imply that the music covered by the genre was intended only for people who take drugs, and this has been a major limiting factor in the success of Stoner Rock. Queens of the Stone Age’s poppy version of Stoner Rock gained the attention of people who had previously written of Stoner Rock as music for the inebriated and their second album ‘Rated R’ was a worldwide hit, charting highly in the US and UK markets.
The success of Queens of the Stone Age prompted the music media and the fans to take an interest in the music of Kyuss (who disbanded in 1995). Once again, the popularity of Stoner Rock increased on a global scale, albeit moderately. The bands success also meant that people international started to take more of an interest in Stoner Rock and bands like Sweden’s Spiritual Beggars or Australia’s Rollerball began to grow in popularity.
Thanks to the internet, the international Stoner Rock scene was kept alive, as bands from Europe found fans in the USA and vice-versa. Stoner Rock is now undoubtedly a genre with an international rather than local fan base. It is not uncommon for a band to sell a respectable number of records, and have a large following, whilst at the same time, being unable to attract people to their local shows.
The rise of Stoner Rock from a small, local trend consisting of a small number of bands, into a global scene and a fully-fledged genre, thanks to the internet is a good example of how technology can influence the success of a particular genre of popular music. As synthesiser development in the 1980s sparked the rise in electronic dance music and guitar-amplification paved the way for rock ‘n’ roll, the internet allowed an obscure and little-followed genre of music to become and international success.
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